Bay 12 Games Forum

Quote from: EnigmaticHat on October 07, 2015, 06:29:26 pm

Saw a video of the new battlefront beta.  Player was on the stormtrooper team.  His blaster had what very much looked like a side mounted magazine, but the game has no reload mechanic that I'm aware of.  This bothered me way more than it should have.

Quote from: EnigmaticHat on October 07, 2015, 07:01:56 pm

Seriously though, it pissed me off.  I kept anticipating the quick FPS "pull clip away and shove in a new one near instantly", like I could see the reload animation playing in my head, but it never happened.

...

You do realize that EA didn't design the weapons, right?

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

The BlasTech E-11, primary weapon of Imperial Stormtroopers everywhere, derived from the DC-15 used by the original Clone Troopers, and later replaced by the nigh-identical Stormtrooper One.

It has the appearance it does primarily because of the actual guns which were converted to props--the production crew used modified British submachine guns. That's the real-world reason why it looks like there's a small magazine on the side: that's where the magazine feed was on the Sterling, and they just put a cap over it when they converted them into prop blasters.

So if you're looking for someone to blame, blame the New Hope film crew for using real guns as the base for their prop guns. Most of the infantry weapons have similar appearances (at least in the original trilogy) because pretty much everything was a different conversion of the Sterling. A few that weren't: Leia's pistol was a Vostok Margolin .22LR target pistol with cosmetic changes to the muzzle, a couple of the heavy blasters were based on the MG34 and MG15, the Ion Blaster was a heavily cut down Lee Enfield, stuff like that.

On the starwars note: the lore as I understood it is that blasters fire a plasma bolt generated by shining a focused laser beam through tibanna gas. The strength of the laser matters, apparently, as does the composition of the gas, probably some other shit. The lasers job is to excite the gas such that it exits the barrel as superheated plasma and wrecks someones shit before dispersing again. What this means, though, is that you have to get the gas into the weapon. The cartridge is probably both a compressed gas container and battery with enough life to fire that gas until exhausted and like, charge a battery in the weapon itself just to top that one off if there are other electronics. Or at least, that would be how I designed such a system. Having to keep track of batteries and gas canisters separately when you have to change them both regularly would be a pain in the ass.

Quote from: LordBaal on October 07, 2015, 11:26:13 am

Mission to mars fail in spectacular manner and lone survivor has to struggle to avoid ceasing all body metabolic functions, a state better known as fucking dead. And somewhere in there there's a rescue mission.

Also its based on a book or something.

So it turns out, I have to learn how to do this by noon tomorrow.  The cool thing is I watched a single tutorial and successfully did it within my first few tries.  The not cool thing is a couple hours later, I'm still not getting consistent results.  I need to be able to stack 3, then 4, then 5 dice within a couple minutes.  My best so far is managing to stack 5 three times in a row.  And three is just pretty easy to do at this point.

Quote from: Sirus on October 06, 2015, 11:50:26 am

Quote from: Arx on October 06, 2015, 11:17:18 am

Renewable power is now cheaper to build than fossil in Germany and the UK. Pretty happy about this, hoping it spreads.

From the URL, I thought that someone had managed to harness solar wind for power and started to wonder just how that had happened

Boop. :3